The ‘Facebook Organ Donor‘ feature wasn’t the only update to hit the world’s largest social network this week. On Wednesday Facebook announced another way for users to interact with their friends and contacts by rolling out “action links“.
Open Graph apps now have the wherewithal to customise links so that instead of just being able to Like or Comment on a post, users can now take a relevant action depending on the type of content they are seeing. For example, if someone posted a recipe from somewhere that you liked the look of, you can now click “Save this Recipe”, or if someone checks in on FourSquare at a place you’d like to go, you can hit “Save this Place”.
Writing on Facebook’s developer blog, Alex Wyler said this of action links:
“These customizable links provide another way for people to do something within your app when your Open Graph stories appear in news feed, timeline or ticker.”
To me this seems like a good idea. Think of all the times you’ve been scrolling through your news feed – increasingly on a mobile device – and seen something that you’d like to follow-up on, but simply don’t have the time to pursue it there and then. It can be hard remembering all the things you have Liked and who the original poster was, so tracking down that thing you thought was really cool can become increasingly difficult.
With more and more people posting more and more content, trying to find one particular link or photo on Facebook can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. If you’re finding it difficult to keep track of all your various social media activities, use SocialSafe to download your content from numerous services and create a searchable, offline, social journal.